EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Were you upset last June when the Celtics traded Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to Brooklyn? Even though you knew the day was coming eventually, did you shed a basketball tear at the end of the era and loss of a longshot last hurrah?

Well, you had company. Across the continent, Kobe Bryant felt your pain — and some of his own.

“Absolutely,” he said recently after a Lakers practice that went on without him and his fractured left knee. “It was tough to see that happen. I mean, going against Paul and KG, Lakers-Celtics? That’s good basketball.”

Bryant shook his head and hit the memory button on his mind’s DVR.

“When we played against them, you saw really good basketball,” Kobe said. “You saw smart players, unselfish players who played both ends of the floor, multi-faceted players.

“So of course I’d hoped for a team like that to stick together, because that’s the maximum level of competition that you’re going to have. I mean, that 2010 series is my favorite series of all time, just because it was the most competitive one. It was the most difficult one. I mean, we’re going against four future Hall of Famers. That doesn’t happen too often.”

Having lost the 2008 Finals to the Celtics in six games and come back to win in seven two years later, Bryant smiled and admitted he’d harbored the hope that the two fabled franchises could thread the NBA needle and meet in the rubber match this spring.

He laughed long and hard when it was suggested that such a series might resemble Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro starring in “Grudge Match.”

“Yeah,” Kobe said, “but in boxing it looks a little bit different than it does in a team sport. In a team sport, you can hide a little bit more. But, of course. As a competitor, you want to be able to see that and face them.”

Sitting on a hallway table at the Lakers’ practice facility, Bryant then chose to unburden himself of a deep, dark secret. Despite being sidelined, he talked of making the road trip with the Lakers and, in particular, tonight’s Garden stop. His voice lowered to just above a whisper. Kobe was serious, and Kobe was smiling.

“I love it,” he said. “I love going into Boston. I love playing there. I mean, the fans are incredible, because, you know, they’re nasty, but they appreciate the game. They appreciate good basketball. They appreciate players who go out there and just leave it all on the court. You know, friend or foe, they have an appreciation for it.

“I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to interact a little bit with the crowd, absolutely. I’ll have a chance to kind of look around and look at the numbers in the rafters and kind of appreciate it a little bit more. Absolutely, because when you play, you know, you’ve got your blinders on. You’ve got tunnel vision. This will be good.”

If you’re slightly stunned at Bryant’s affection for a place that, at least outwardly, appears to hold so little of it for him, that’s certainly fair. Kobe’s a little surprised, as well. He once again recounted his 1996 pre-draft visit to Boston, putting on Celtics gear and working out with then-assistant coach Dennis Johnson.

“Oh, man,” Bryant said, “I didn’t want to go, because I was such a Lakers fan. And then I went and I had the best time. I had the best time. I was like, these guys aren’t that bad. D.J.’s actually a really great guy, and it’s not as bad as I thought playing on a green floor.”

When he became a Laker, he didn’t get the Boston-LA lecture from his elders.

“Not really,” Kobe said. “They didn’t have to. It was more like I had questions for them because I was such a big fan. None of them really felt the need to explain to me what was going on because just in the conversations that we had they could automatically tell that I knew my history and I was a big fan. I was more the one asking them questions, and Byron (Scott) would tell me all the old stories about playing in the old Boston Garden. But those guys were hanging around all the time anyway. I’d see James (Worthy). I’d see Cap (captain Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Kurt (Rambis) and (assistant coach) Bill Bertka, so everybody was around.”

Bryant may have known all about the rivalry, but he finally got to drink it in.

“In 2008, that was it,” he said. “Prior to that, Boston had some struggles. Like when we played them there, it seemed like there were more Laker fans than Celtic fans. But in ’08, that’s when everything turned and it was a palpable sense in the city about the Celtics and the Lakers. You could feel it.

“It’s a personal thing. Even though now Bird and Magic are all good friends and off the court the rivalry is kind of put behind, on the court, I mean, that’s still there. When you think about how many championships we cost them during that era and how many championships they’ve cost the Lakers, there’s got to be some tension there. The way I look at it, they cost me my sixth one. I should be sitting here with six.”

The fact Kobe Bryant was sitting while his mates went through practice is another issue. At 35, does he really need this anymore? As he pushes himself through a second rehab in less than a year (the knee fracture came six games after his return from a torn Achilles tendon), what, really, does he have to prove?

“It’s coming back from this injury,” he said. “Father time eventually will win, but now it’s a matter of keeping him at bay for several more years while everybody else is thinking that this is it for me — that this is the time and it’s over. That’s the challenge, trying to figure out how to solve the puzzle of the human body, the aging human body.”

And Bostonians may well be on his side in this battle. As with Pierce and KG, they don’t want to see Kobe go. It wouldn’t be as much fun without him.

Steve Bulpett is in his 34th season covering the Celtics. In addition to being the dean of NBA beat writers in continuous service with a team, he's also followed the Celtics as a home and away beat longer than anyone in franchise history. The native of Lynn and Swampscott is a graduate of the University of Dayton, where he pursued dreams of playing basketball and becoming a lawyer. Reality intervened on the court, but he found a way to stay involved in the game. He left UD with an intramural hoop championship (teammates with sportscaster Dan Patrick) and a journalism degree.